


The Missing Chapter or Silas Is Not A Vampire

by i_am_a_hog



Category: The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Backstory, Canon Backstory, anyway, but you know.., literally.... write fanfiction, this was an assignment for my class, well the assignment was: write a missing chapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 21:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21083264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_am_a_hog/pseuds/i_am_a_hog
Summary: Assignment for class was: Write a missing chapter for the Graveyard Book, so I wrote some backstory about Miss Lupescu and Silas!





	The Missing Chapter or Silas Is Not A Vampire

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah I didn't get that Silas was implied to be a vampire so he's not. I can do what I want lmao

Easter was coming up, and Silas was not comfortable leaving Bod again so soon, but it had been a decade since his last visit to Jerusalem. These visits were somewhat of a personal tradition, Silas upheld religiously. His name, not that he volunteered it often, helped him to blend in and had done so for two thousand years. 

“Are you going to be gone for a long time?” Bod asked, big eyes looking up at Silas in a way that made Silas very aware of his need to protect him.

“Only two weeks.”

“Can’t you take me with you?”

“You know you’re not allowed out of the Graveyard,” Silas replied sternly. Bod looked at the ground. “But do you want to see Miss Lupescu again?”

At once, Bod’s face lit up, and he bounced on one leg before he turned around, racing down the hill, and shouted over his shoulder,

“I have to tell mother!”

Silas didn’t smile. It wasn’t something he freely did. But he did feel a certain warmth in his chest at the certainty that Bod was going to be safe with his teacher.

* * *

Miss Lupescu had never particularly liked children, or cooking – on entirely unrelated notes of course. She had grown up the second daughter of a single mother, taking with her the skill of cooking, but unlike her sister, not the passion for it. She told herself that Bod’s disgusted reaction to the food she brought him stemmed from this lack of passion behind her meals and not the actual meals themselves. It would have hurt her family pride, and the boy was annoying enough as it was. Or perhaps that was merely how all children of this age behaved.

Regardless, Miss Lupescu remained strong-willed and bull - no, wolf-headed, and eventually, her approach to teaching caught on, despite the differences between Bod and herself. Leaving the boy had been a lot harder than she had originally expected, but leaving the graveyard felt good. She needed the change of pace and the liveliness of the living world.

* * *

Time passes in a blur when you are with someone you love, Miss Lupescu realized, when Silas stood at her door several months later, just before Easter. She spent her winter reading and cuddling up in front of the fireplace with her wife Elizabeth, much like the winters of the two centuries before had passed. Miss Lupescu had not expected to see Silas for another two months at least, counting on a busy spring, with plans to see Elizabeth’s extended undead family. These plans faded away underneath Silas’ stare.

“Who’s there?” Elizabeth shouted from the kitchen, before her curly-haired head popped out of the doorway to check herself; as always too impatient to wait for an answer. Miss Lupescu allowed herself one of the tight-lipped smiles Silas only seldomly got to see.

“My business will keep me away for a fortnight,” he stated, and her smile dried up.

“Won’t you come in, Silas? Have a cup of tea?”

Silas straightened his back and shook his head, but before he could utter his decision, Elizabeth was standing next to him. With a stubborn hand on his elbow, she nudged him inside rather less than gently with a grin on her face, that just so revealed pearl-white teeth, that shone like daggers from her lively face.

“Will you put on the kettle, honey?” she called over her shoulder before her bouncing curls and Silas’ unwavering silhouette disappeared into the living room. For the second time, a tight-lipped smile graced Miss Lupescu’s face.

Silas didn’t drink his tea. He never did. Miss Lupescu met Elizabeth’s eyes over her teacup and the smile in her wife’s eyes calmed her down.

“You want me to look after the boy?”

Silas nodded, the cup gently cradled by his long fingers, as if he was absorbing the warmth from it – perhaps he was.

“He has grown. He can fade out of even  _ my _ view for a second now, and he has more energy than ever, but I have no doubt you will manage.”

Miss Lupescu nodded and took another sip of her tea. She was not going to admit it readily, but she was looking forward to the challenges that came with teaching Bod, and as if he was reading her thoughts, Silas added, “He’s looking forward to seeing you again.” He stared at Miss Lupescu as if he could see inside her soul, while one of his hands came up, grey finger tip absentmindedly tracing a near invisible scar line at his other wrist. Miss Lupescu had not been aware that Silas could scar at all.

“I need to leave for Israel,” was all he said when he saw her inquisitive stare.

The silence that followed could have been uncomfortable - Silas refusing to elaborate, Miss Lupescu unwilling to back down – until Elizabeth chirped up.

“I’d love to meet him.” Both Silas and Miss Lupescu turned to look at her.

“Bod,” she specified, as if they had not understood.

“You don’t like being around the Living,” Miss Lupescu murmured, remembering the last time Elizabeth had spent around the Living, two decades before. There had been bloodshed and Elizabeth only narrowly avoided escalating it further, and since preferred to keep to her fellow non-Living contemporaries. Now, she merely looked sternly from Miss Lupescu to Silas and repeated, “I’d love to meet him.”

And Silas’ nod confirmed it.

* * *

“Your wife?” Bod asked and looked back and forth between Miss Lupescu and Elizabeth. Their hands were intertwined, but if Miss Lupescu could have it her way, she would let go, straighten her back and clasp her hands behind it. Elizabeth just grinned with glinting teeth and shining eyes under her dark curls.

“Yes!” she exclaimed, and Miss Lupescu had to make an effort not to bury her face in her hands. To her surprise, Bod grinned back at Elizabeth.

“Oh. Okay! You’re really pretty,” and as if that was the logical consequence, he grabbed Elizabeth’s other hand and pulled her towards the Egyptian Walk. “Let me show you my home!”

So it came that Miss Lupescu was lying in the spring sun, head resting on her paws, while Bod leaned up against her. A year ago, this wouldn’t have been possible in her wildest dreams, but Bod taught her things, just as she did him. Just as Elizabeth taught Bod about the Undead. The previous year, Miss Lupescu had taught Bod how to avoid them, how to shield himself from their senses, but Elizabeth taught him how to fight. The topic made Miss Lupescu uncomfortable because it meant teaching Bod how to fight her wife. Elizabeth however seemed to revel in the lesson.

With one hand in Miss Lupescu’s fur, Bod gestured with the other animatedly as he asked Elizabeth,

“So, they are not Living and not Dead? Like Silas?”

Elizabeth smiled, teeth glinting. “Not quite. Silas exists beyond those concepts. He has been alive  _ and _ dead. Now, he just  _ is _ . But the Undead are stuck  _ between _ Living and Dead.”

Bod nodded and thought about Silas. He was old, very old. Bod could barely imagine a time he could have been alive.

* * *

Even Silas himself had trouble remembering sometimes. His life, thousands of years ago, was only a blur now, faded next to the millennia of his present existence. But even though he had existed like this for so long, it had taken a long time for him to get to where he was; calm, at peace with his existence, helpful even. In the beginning there had been wrath. No good came from wrath, from untamed anger, and from grief, but it had taken Silas several centuries to realise that. His life had ended in agony and his death was spent regretting; his eternity lay in learning. Because something or someone had decided to give Silas another chance - his regret had reached a higher power, maybe even God, that lifted Silas above life or death, that made him a solitary type. So solitary indeed that there was no closer description of him than that. Because Silas had died. And Silas had lived.

The previous year Silas had been in San Francisco and he had discovered something that reminded him of his life. His real life, with a beating heart and such. He had discovered men there, passing among the Living, who thought themselves better, and he saw their patterns all over Jerusalem. Much had changed here during the last two-thousand years: People had died and others were born – generations of people, an abundance of wars, and the constant coming and going of faith, rolling over the city like the waves of the ocean over a pebble in the sand. Faith shaped the city, and Silas remembered his life better than anywhere else, right there, in the city that had helped to shape him.

His visit to the city had more sentimental reasons than his absence from the graveyard the year before. In San Francisco, he had been following a hunch, but this trip was personal, so Silas was surprised to find the same patterns as the year before. The same men - Living, but not quite, or maybe just a bit more than Living - were here in Jerusalem. Then, Silas recalled blurry memories, twisted by millennia that came and went, pulling at the edges. He recalled those same glinting eyes and dark robes, recalled sharp daggers and knives, that never went dull, and loud voices, that influenced the masses and yet managed to blend in among the shouts of countless tongues. He recalled the slicing of the knives, the sharpened senses, and the sick feeling of power gone terribly wrong.

The silver they paid had been as cutting and cold as the blades. In retrospect, Silas wondered why it had taken him two thousand years to make these connections, but he did not regret the time it took him. The past was the past. Mistakes were made and long gone. All action needed a plan.

Silas climbed a hill outside the city. Nightfall clothed the horizon in purple and gold, royal as the view deserved, and there was no one around. If anybody had been around indeed, they would barely have noticed the shadow floating by; Silas was taking precautions. Sitting down on a boulder, he allowed himself a moment to breathe, not that he needed it - it was more of an emotional support. A preparation of sorts.

_ Protect the child, _ he had heard here, a decade ago - the last time he came here. It was a voice he had not heard in two millennia and a language dead for almost as long. Silas had not expected to ever hear it again, the first surprise he experienced in centuries. 

_ The child is safe, _ Silas muttered in a dead language, unsure if anybody was there to hear him. There was a presence there, something that eluded even Silas, but it encouraged him to continue.

_ I connected the dots. Did you want me to do that? _ He paused for a moment.  _ They are after him. To protect him I need to end them. _ After letting out a shivering breath, as if he was afraid, he said one more sentence. A whisper, paradoxically unsure, but spoken with conviction.

_ And that would avenge Him. Christ. And you, too. _

The silence that followed swallowed Silas. Anybody happening upon the scene would have felt a nervous tension and looked away from the big boulder, otherwise perceiving peaceful quiet.

For the second time within days, Silas’ fingertips found the line of the silver-grey scar at his wrist. He still felt the shackles sometimes, heavy, pulling him down, away from the light, away from hope. The earthquake that had come to his rescue had been mighty, shattering the shackles with the force of God. The scars never left, even after his death, they remained, and reminded Silas of his purpose.

Silas sat and waited for hours, lost in thoughts he did not usually entertain. Eventually, he rose. He was going to go back to Bod, to teach him and to watch over him, and to protect him from harm. 

As soon as he took the first step, a feeling of warmth embraced him, and though no one appeared, he felt a kiss pressed to his forehead. Again, memories from his life rose to the surface, a preacher to the masses, the most famous teacher of all times and the feeling of warmth in one person. Betrayed by a loved one, and both of these deaths, Christ and Judas, killed by men in dark clothes, with tongues as sharp as their knives; killed as a king and as a criminal.

So, Silas’ steps carried him away, mind set on his duties, while one last sentence echoed in his mind, connecting his life to eternity and his past to Bod’s future:

_ Thank you. _

* * *

Upon his return to the Graveyard, Silas found Bod happy. He hugged Elizabeth goodbye and Miss Lupescu wolfishly smiled farewell. Silas’ steely resolve to protect Bod was reinforced. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! Thanks for reading and as always, comments and kudos are greatly appreciated <3


End file.
